When the bounding volumes of two solids overlap in all axes they are flagged to be tested by more precise and time-consuming algorithms.
Sweep and prune exploits temporal coherence as it is likely that solids do not move significantly between two simulation steps.
Because of that, at each step, the sorted lists of bounding volume starts and ends can be updated with relatively few computational operations.
To circumvent this, temporal coherence can be used to compute the changes in bounding volume geometry with fewer operations.
[2] Later works like the 1995 paper about I-COLLIDE by Jonathan D. Cohen et al. [3] refer to the algorithm as sweep and prune.